Picking Up the Threads

All us Lord of the Rings fans will recall Frodo, wandering through the halls of Bag End after his terrible adventure, wondering how to take up his life where he had left it, just over a year before.  I am surprised to find how much my post-Head of School time resembles that wandering and wondering.  It is more than a month since I was officially done with my job there and yet I am still shilly-shallying, napping, thinking about getting back to writing, and not actually doing it.

For two years I have been working at full stretch, keeping despair and sloth to one side, slogging along one day at a time.  Perhaps not at full stretch, really, since I preserved my energies for each coming week by licking my wounds on the weekends, losing myself in novel revisions, and doing anything but school-work – if possible – unless it was artwork or other creative stuff.

Instead of blogging ponderings about places and their meaning, I wrote a weekly essay for the school newsletter reflecting on the importance of good education, good faith, hard work, common goals, and the like, and kept the rest very private.  Facebook proved a false friend for sharing worries about my work, and I shut down all communication unless in my official capacity on the official school site.

Now, God willing, that the academic glory of Saint Michael’s has been restored and, reduced to a much trimmer form, has not only weathered the worst of its financial storms but should also weather the years to come, and now that it has been handed off to capable and fresher leadership, perhaps now, after a month’s dozing and traveling and reflecting and scribbling, I can open the dusty binders of research, still stacked on my desk, gather up the sheafs of notes and photographs and poetical squibs, reconnect with whatever it was they were trying to say and pump fresh ink into them, and start again to produce something spatial.